I’d Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You, and Other Stories
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Bestselling author Julianna Baggott delivers her mind-bending debut short-story collection, featuring an array of genres populated by deeply human characters, and with film rights to the stories already having been sold to Netflix, Paramount, Amblin, Lionsgate, and others!
In the title story, set five minutes in the future where you not only have a credit score but also a dating score, a woman who’s been banished from all dating apps attends a weekly help group with others who have been “banned for life,” and finds herself falling in love. In “Backwards,” a twist on Benjamin Button, a woman reconnects with her estranged father as he de-ages ten years each day they spend together. In “Welcome to Oxhead,” all the parents in a gated community “shut off” when the power goes out. In “Portals,” a small town deals with hope and loss when dozens of portals suddenly open. In “The Now of Now,” two teenagers who can literally stop time find themselves falling in love. In “How They Got In,” a grieving family starts to see a murdered girl in all of their old home videos. In “The Versions,” two stand-in androids fall in love at a wedding, even though they’re not programmed to have emotion. And many other stories of the weird and wonderful.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Baggott (Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders) delivers a moving fantastical collection. In "Nest," a teenager is overcome with guilt over her mother's suicide and haunted by her mother's ghost, who has a bird's nest for a jaw. In "The Knock-Offs," people obsessed with celebrities create children using stolen DNA from their favorite stars. Baggott structures the story as a series of letters to the actor Bradley Cooper, in which the narrator, Cooper's biological daughter, begs Cooper to help her mother avoid prison time for stealing his DNA. "The Gaslighter's Lament" features AI robots designed to gaslight people at the behest of customers. Things go sideways after one of the robots turns the tables on its client. In "Inkmorphia," a woman's memorial tattoo to her brother won't stop changing its shape and placement, driving her to look deeper into the cause of his death and her repressed memories of the event. The title story features a woman who falls in love in a support group for people who have been banned from dating apps after their "dating credit" score was "dinged" by exes. Though the narrators' voices tend to bleed together, Baggott does a commendable job of exploring their grief and loneliness through the stories' strange phenomena. This is stacked with feats of imagination.
